“No,” he said, and then he saw Lis and Pauli, bedraggled but unharmed, standing a short distance away. He dropped the bike and ran up to them, and they hugged.
“What happened?” he asked, although the answer was fairly obvious.
“Part of the roof collapsed under the shelling. It was terrible. The screams of the injured were awful and the blinding dust made helping them almost impossible. So many are dead. It was just like Berlin.” She started to shake, and he held her again to calm her.
After a moment, Logan grabbed her arm and she pulled Pauli along. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” she sobbed.
“If I can’t find anyplace else, I’ll take you back to my bunker.” At least, he thought wryly, the roof had held up so far. The sight of the ruined shelter confirmed his worst nightmare. The military bunkers were far better constructed than those for the civilians, and the carnage among nonmilitary personnel was bound to be awful.
The three of them ran, painfully aware that the Russians could begin shelling at any time. They were in the misleadingly calm eye of a military hurricane. Suddenly, Logan stopped and stood in amazement. An airplane was coming straight down the street at him. It was Ames the reporter in his Piper Cub. He had found a stretch of level ground and was planning to take off.
“He’s leaving,” yelled Logan. He ran directly in front of the slowly moving plane and waved. Ames, looking pale and confused by the interruption, stopped, but did not cut the engine.
“Get out of my way, soldier.”
Logan opened the passenger door and grabbed Ames by the arm. “You’re taking two people out of here.”
“Bullshit, this plane is full.”
Logan pulled his pistol, cocked it, and placed it next to Ames’s skull. Ames paled and tried to pull back. With his free hand, Logan yanked on Ames’s duffel bag and threw it on the ground. “I say this plane has room.” Logan grabbed another sack and flung it to the ground.
“Hey,” screamed Ames, “some of that stuff doesn’t even belong to me.”
“Tough shit. And don’t move this plane when I take this gun off your head. If you even try, I’ll put a bullet through you or that gas you got stored in the back. If it goes up, you’ll be just another large grease fire.”
Ames glanced back at the stack of five-gallon cans loaded for extra fuel, gulped, and nodded reluctant agreement. Logan picked up an unprotesting Elisabeth and pushed her into the plane. Then he handed her Pauli, and the boy settled in on Elisabeth’s lap on the seat behind Ames.
“Now,” Logan snarled at Ames, “get the fuck out of here.”
A relieved Ames needed no further encouragement. Logan stepped away as Ames turned the little craft in the direction of the clear ground. Logan stared as Elisabeth looked at him through the small window. Neither attempted to say anything. He tried to memorize her pale and frightened face. It had all been so sudden, and one way or another, she and Pauli were actually leaving Potsdam.
The Piper Cub picked up speed and quickly lifted off until it was about fifty feet off the ground, then it began to settle back down. Logan screamed in horror, thinking it was going to crash, until it steadied at the ridiculously low altitude of only about twenty feet and headed toward the river. It was barely visible when he saw it turn left toward Berlin. He understood Ames’s plan. The reporter was going to try to fly northwest toward the Danish border. That way he might stand a chance of staying out of the great battles to the west. As to the low altitude, it would help him stay invisible and avoid any conflicts he couldn’t possibly win. Logan could only pray that Ames’s skills as a pilot were up to the demands of flying at what was less than treetop height. He also prayed that he had done the right thing for Elisabeth and Pauli.
He heard footsteps pounding up to him. “I ought to court-martial your ass!” snarled an infuriated and livid Captain Dimitri. “That was a dumb fucking trick to pull.”
Logan stood up. “Guess what, Captain, I don’t really give a shit! I just hope I did the right thing for them and that maybe they’ll have a chance to live. You saw what happened at the church. The civilians are going to die. Maybe we’ll get lucky and become prisoners, but not them. Even if they survive the artillery, they’re going to get butchered if we lose. If I saved them from that fate, then anything you have in mind for me is okay.”
Dimitri stared at him, his anger quickly ebbing. “Go back to your bunker, Lieutenant,” he managed to say. “We stay out here any longer and the Russians are going to start shelling again. We’ll talk about it later. If there is a later, that is.”
Field Marshal Georgi Zhukov growled as the air-raid sirens went off again and then suddenly cut short, as if someone had pulled the plug. “What now?”
Chuikov put down a field phone and shrugged. “More American planes, comrade. Perhaps it’s our turn to be bombed. Shall we go to a shelter?” They were in the basement of a ruined farmhouse.
“How many planes?” asked Zhukov. He waited a moment while Chuikov asked for and got the needed information. Great waves of American bombers had been attacking to the north. These were fairly ineffective attacks, as his tanks were hidden and not parked in tight rows. Even so, they did cause damage. He needed at least one more day to complete the allocation of scarce fuel among the vehicles to ensure a continuation of their attacks on the American positions.
“Just three,” said Chuikov. “Probably those damned photo planes they send over every now and then. That is why the sirens cut out so quickly.”
Zhukov accepted the comment and dismissed the planes as relatively unimportant. Once again he pored over the maps of the area and how they tied in with the complex plan for the next series of assaults. He would not let the Americans rest and recover, even though his own resources were severely limited.
“Look,” someone yelled. “You can see them.”
Curious, Zhukov stepped outside and stared upward. He could just barely make out the reflection on the distant belly of the plane. “What kind of pictures can they possibly take from that altitude?”
Chuikov laughed. “I have no idea, comrade Marshal, but should we not smile and wave? Or better, I shall have our soldiers expose themselves.”
Zhukov smiled tolerantly at his protege. “Not now. And didn’t you say there were three planes? Where are the other two?”
A staff major was watching the sky with binoculars. “Two others peeled off a moment ago, sir. Oh, look, the bomber has dropped something.”
Chuikov was puzzled. It couldn’t be just one bomb, now could it? That made no sense at all.
Zhukov snatched the binoculars from the unprotesting major. He found the falling object fairly easily as it reflected light quite brightly. The plane was in a steep banking turn. Whatever the plane had dropped did look like it could be a bomb. But one bomb?
A feeling of sick dread seized him. What had he heard about the Americans and a secret weapon? A superbomb? The object seemed to grow as he watched it draw closer. He knew it was too late to flee.
At under two thousand feet in the sky, a second sun dawned with unprecedented fury. For many who saw it, whether they survived or not, it was the last thing their scorched eyes took in. Those farther away described it as a pink-white incandescent flare and an incredibly glowing orb. Almost immediately, there was a tremendous and deafening clap of thunder. It was followed by a howling, shrieking wind and a suffocating blast of heat.
Within a three-quarter-mile circle from the center of the explosion, everything died.
Outside the circle, the shock and heat destroyed structures and vehicles, started fires, and caused secondary explosions. The force took the debris it made and turned the most innocent of objects into lethal projectiles that seemed to seek out and penetrate screaming and terrified flesh. Above, the fireball turned into a churning black cloud that raised itself into the sky like a horrific, monstrous, living thing.